Installing Xandros on a ThinkPad 600X

One of the primary goals of the Xandros distribution is to provide an installation process of world-class simplicity. Just boot from the Xandros installation CD and click four times, and the O/S magically installs. Unfortunately, there is a small issue with that process on the Thinkpad 600X. Upon booting, the LILO loader goes into convulsions, doing nothing except spraying L80...80 all over your console. (This is confirmed to be the case with the Open Circulation Edition (OCE) versions 2.0.1 and 3.0.1).

Fortunately, there is a solution. (Actually, two). If you have a 3.5" diskette drive, you get to use the easiest of the two. Simply find a Windows PC and start the installer from the CD-ROM. When the wizard opens, choose the option to start the installation from diskette. On the next page, you will find a button for creating a boot diskette. Create the diskette and exit the installer. Take your CD and the diskette to your laptop, proceed to boot from the diskette and you are on your way.

Note, for OCE 3.0.1, two diskettes are required to launch the installer from diskette. The diskettes made by the 2.0.1 and 3.0.1 installers are not interchangeable. Just make the diskette(s) fresh from the particular version of the OCE installation diskette you will be using for the install.

If you do not have a diskette drive for your 600X, you will have to create a bootable CD-ROM based on the bootable diskette created as above, using floppy emulation and loadlin.exe to launch the linux installer. For detailed instructions, see http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?t=3580